[Image: “The Heartbeat of a Typophile,” an interpretation of a heartbeat, created by displaying the title phrase as it appears using a font called “FR Pasta Mono.” The font is the creation of a type designer named Béla Frank; I found this “cardiographic” illustration posted (under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) on Flickr, in the photostream of a user there identified as arnoKath.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain’s belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself.
(Harry Middleton [source])
…and:
Fall In
Write without reason.
Go too far. Fall in, fall in.
Say I am here, my palms are open
even though you are lost and don’t know
who you are.
(Laurie Doctor [source])
…and:
Egocentricity, the illusion of separateness, requires constant maintenance. What maintains it is that endless buzz-buzz-buzz in our minds, telling us who we are, who they are, what we are doing, what is important, where we are going next – creating that subject-object relationship in every split second. The continual brainwashing that maintains our identity is like a tape loop.
Every time we pay attention, every time we are present, it is like cutting through that tape. Of course, the tape is instantly spliced back together again, so in the beginning there can be these little snips and then these quick repairs, and you can’t really tell any damage was done. But when you start paying attention more, the snips are more frequent. Then egocentricity gets in a real bind, because if we continue to pay attention, we are going to see how it all works, how the illusion is created.
The first thing we see is how most of what goes on in our minds is nonsense. Here we are, trying to think deep and yet lofty thoughts, but in fact it’s mostly gobbledygook.
Egocentricity continues to play those tapes that maintain our conditioning. But once you see what is happening, the power of it falls away. And you begin to change; you are not able to hold the identity together in the same way.
Ego’s only hope of maintaining the illusion of separateness is to get you to quit paying attention to what goes on in your mind.
(Cheri Huber, Trying to be Human [source])
From elsewhere:
…and:
I have seen the souls of the dead, traveling in a branching river; they look very much like white blood cells, a pale doughnut-like shape, I cannot tell whether there is anything in the centers, or whether the centers are empty. When one of them comes to a fork in the river, it need not go either one way or the other; it may go both ways. It is able to do this because souls are not bound by time in the same way that living bodies are, so that it is able to exist in what we would understand as two places at once. Also it can move either backward or forward in time, in addition to what we might call this sideways motion, this ability to exist simultaneously in different spaces. Some souls are interested in our world and try to speak to us, but it is really very difficult for them to have much effect, not having bodies of their own, and some of them go around looking for people to talk to, but there are so few of us who can hear them. The recently dead are remembered by the living and so they can speak to them for a while, these people are receptive, but those who are long dead have a much smaller chance of finding anyone and they become fuzzy, their particular features are worn away as they go tumbling along in the great river. They glow, they wait for us, but we cannot find them. Sometimes you will hear one calling from very far away, very faint waves or pulses like a radio broadcast from a planet in another galaxy, scattered signals that are almost impossible to distinguish from the static, which is made up of meaningless bits and pieces of other voices that have broken down over the great distance into a kind of dust. But in the midst of this static you will think you can identify one voice, sentences that you can almost piece together, as an archaeologist can construct an entire body from a few splinters of bone; but of course sometimes you will get it wrong, and this is a great tragedy, both for you and for the soul who is trying to communicate with you. I am talking to you… Be careful. Can you understand what I’m saying?
(Kirsten Bakis [source])
…and:
Praisesong
At the coffee shop you love,
white mugs heavy on the table
between us, young baristas—
spiky haired and impatient—
cannot imagine how two people
so old to them can feel so wanton,
coffee growing cold between us,
middle-aged bodies growing hot
under the other’s gaze. Even now,
apart, you send me songs so I may
listen to love from the golden throat
of a saxophone, piano keys playing
jazz across my soft belly.
How is it the tide of terror
has quit rising in me, or rises
and recedes as tides do, bringing
sea glass worked smooth
and lovely by the sheer fact
of time, bringing trash—
plastic mesh and old sneakers—
useless things now we might
bag up and remove, bringing
a lapping tongue of water up
over our toes as we hold hands
and walk along its edge—
carefully, gleefully, both.
(Sarah Browning [source])
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